A few months after a controversy erupted over the design of the District’s state quarter, the Post managed to get images of three new possible designs on Friday. According to Post reporter David Nakamura, the three designs — Benjamin Banneker appears on one, Duke Ellington on another, and Frederick Douglass on the third — will be officially released soon and subjected to public comment before a winner is chosen in time for a 2009 rollout.

According to Dena Iverson, spokesperson for Mayor Adrian Fenty, the designs published in the Post are not final, and the Mint has asked the city not to release them until they are. Nakamura, apparently carrying his own camera, managed to snap a few pictures of the designs at the monthly Mayor-Council breakfast last week, allowing him to beat every other media outlet in the area to the punch. Nakamura is the same reporter who was recently accused of having scoops spoon-fed to him by the Fenty administration, though to be fair, both the Washington City Paper’s Mike DeBonis and WTOP’s Mark Segraves told us they did not attend the breakfast meeting last week, which is theoretically open to the media.

We asked for images of the designs to publish on DCist, but were told we’d have to wait until the Mint gave the city the go-ahead, so you’ll just have to make do with our artist’s rendering above until then.

Given the circumstances, the designs are about as good as we could expect. As Post columnist Marc Fisher writes today, none of the three designs fully captures the District’s history and identity. Then again, what does? But after looking at the three, we’d have to go with Frederick Douglass. In the past we expressed sympathy for the Douglass design, mostly because his political activism and writings closely mirror the continuing injustice that District residents face while not having voting rights. Moreover, unlike Ellington and Banneker, Douglass spent the better part of his later years in the District, having settled down in Anacostia. An online poll over at the Post has the Douglass design winning easily.

What do you think? Which quarter would you like to see represent your city?